A solar installation

Solar reaches grid parity around the world

A solar installationWhile fossil fuels keep gathering billions and billions of subsidies around the world, solar PV is reaching grid parity around the world. In the past few weeks I was mentioning how it already happened in the United States.

Now, Climate Progress reports that according to Deutsche Bank, the global solar market would grow by twenty percent in 2013 (with as much as 30 Gigawatts to be installed). But wait, there is more.

Still to Deutsche Bank, solar has already achieved grid parity in India, Italy and under certain conditions, Germany. Even better, this is only the beginning.

As Climate Progress notes, other banks and financial institutions have other fantastic news for solar :

As Renew Economy also points out, this is the third report in the past month anticipating a bright future for the global solar market: UBS released a report that concluded an “unsubsidized solar revolution” was in the works, “Thanks to significant cost reductions and rising retail tariffs, households and commercial users are set to install solar systems to reduce electricity bills – without any subsidies.”

And Macquarie Group argued that costs for rooftop solar in Germany have fallen so far that even with subsidy cuts “solar installations could continue at a torrid pace.”

As the prices of solar panels just keep on dropping and falling and collapsing, the prices of fossil fuels are just going up and up and up. And this is only the beginning as soon more countries will enact carbon taxes and let’s be confident, end fossil fuels subsidies as they don’t make sense any more.

It’s not a mistake if back to 2011 the International Energy Agency stated that by 2060,  a third of ALL global energy needs could be answered by solar energies (photovoltaic, concentrated and thermal) within the next five decades.

More recently, the oil company Shell projected that solar would become the largest source of energy by 2070. By the end of the century, these energy sources could be answering up to 37.7 percent of the global energy demand. Oil and natural gas only ten percent each and coal a tiny 3.9 percent. Please have a look at this excellent Cleantechnica article for more.

To conclude : The future is bright, even blinding bright for solar. If the 19th century was the century of coal and the 20th was the century of oil, the 21st is most likely to be remembered in history books as the solar century. And these are absolutely great news.

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